Baignade en mer

La Mer (1895)

The American title of this Lumiere Brothers short translates to The Sea and that's basically what we watch for thirty-seconds. We see a small number of people splashing around in the water and jumping into it from a dock. There's obviously nothing ground-breaking about this actuality film but at the same time I always enjoy watching these simply because it captures a moment in time and I just think it's rather cool that someone is watching this footage 120+ years after it was shot. Certainly those playing in the water while it was filmed never could have imagined that the movie would still be viewed so many years later.

It's pleasant and rather nostalgic to watch this simple, but lively, footage of a group of swimmers as they dive and splash in the sea. It almost feels as if you are at the seashore, and it also can bring to mind one's own memories of swimming as a youth.

The photography is nicely done in catching the length of the pier and most of the action of the swimmers, and also in catching the rolling motion of the waves as they come towards the camera. Whether by design or by a fortunate coincidence, it makes the movie work even better that it was filmed on a day with such noticeable motion in the sea itself.

The swimmers themselves seem to be having a good time, and it creates an innocent sense of energy and life that accounts for the movie's simple but pleasing nature.

I wonder if the 42 folks who voted on this one include any of the 30 people who cast votes on "Baignade en mer"? Here is a summary of "Baignade": "The sea is before us. Some rocks are visible to the right and a narrow jetty extends about ten meters or so about three feet above the sea, held up by two sets of pylons. A woman and several lads about ten years old are coming out onto the rocks, one climbs onto the jetty at the end. He jumps back into the sea as the lads and lady run out to the end of the jetty and jump off. Even though the sea looks to be only about a foot deep, one boy does a flip into the water and repeats it later. The others simply jump in." If this also describes "La Mer" (1895) then we either have a duplicate entry or we have the first sequel in the history of the movies... or maybe it's the first remake, ahead of "Kiss in the Tunnel" by a full four years.

Back in the days of early cinema many filmmakers would film a choppy sea in order to show audiences how effective a motion picture could be. Audiences, according to some, would freak out at seeing the waves splashing toward them, thinking they'd be soaked. This Lumiere film is one of those, except it has more to it. Besides the sea itself, there is also a pier with several people jumping off into the water. (Nearly all are boys with striped bathing suits, but one appears to be an older female woman). The scene is well photographed, and the Lumieres sure knew were to place the camera to get a good view. I would recommend it to anyone who wants to see an early use of the film camera.

Swimming in the Sea (aka Lumiere No. 11) is an approximately 50-second long actuality of four boys and a woman running down a small, makeshift pier and diving in the ocean. They circle around to jump in again before the short loops.

The Edison Company's early short films for the kinetoscope were often "flatly" shot, even when layered with rows of motion. The effect is similar to sitting in an audience and watching a play from a straight-on angle, with the action in a rectangular box. To a large extent, this style was probably a result of shooting inside the Black Maria, Edison's "film studio" in New Jersey, which was basically just a large cubic space.

Louis and August Lumiere, two other extremely important figures in the early history of cinema who invented the cinématographe, a machine to compete with Edison's kinetoscope, had a very different approach. They focused on actualities, or motion picture records of "real life", documentary style, in contradistinction to Edison's more artificially constructed scenarios. They also had more of a modern photographic eye, as exemplified in Swimming in the Sea, and tended to shoot at unusual, often oblique angles.

The pier in Swimming in the Sea juts out at a sharp angle from the center of the right hand side of the frame and cuts more than two-thirds of the way across. It's a dramatic visual composition, creating an intriguingly exaggerated perspectival depth, made even more dramatic and dynamic by both the rolling ocean and the quickly cycling bathers/divers. The energetic fun of the bathers is easily conveyed, and you can easily imagine their laughter.

This is well worth watching and easily available now on a number of DVD compilations of early shorts.

Note: I've been reviewing a lot of these early short silent films recently (and I plan to continue to review interesting films from throughout the history of cinema), and some readers feel that my rating a film like Swimming in the Sea a 9 is out of whack with giving a film like Constantine (2005) a 7. Some have asked questions like, "Do you really think that Swimming in the Sea is that much more rewarding/entertaining than Constantine?"

I rate using a rough translation of the 1 – 10 scale as something like the U.S. letter grading scale, so a 9 is a "90%", or an "A". I see films as self-defining the "project" they're attempting, and I take historical, budgetary and other cultural considerations into account to determine that. So the question becomes, "Does this film do a good job achieving what it sets for itself as its task, given its historical/cultural context?" I can answer a pretty strong "yes" for a film like Swimming in the Sea, and not as strong of a "yes" for a film like Constantine. Using the same scale for each doesn't imply that they're quantitatively/qualitatively comparable. The idea is that for attempting an actuality that is aesthetically interesting in an era where only 50-second long or so silent, black & white shorts were possible, Swimming in the Sea is very competent. For attempting an epic-scaled comic book film in the high-technology era of the early 21st Century, Constantine is not as competent.